Make it unmissable, make it clever but above all make friends with the planners — these are the lessons for successful mixed-use development learned over the past ten years.
Making a mixed-use development unmissable is perhaps the easiest. Eye-catching architecture and a buzzy atmosphere help to transform leisure, retail and residential space into a must-visit urban destination. Specialists say it can also boost rental income and yields.
Chicago-born Stephen Reinke, managing director at architect Woods Bagot, has seen mixed-use schemes on both sides of the Atlantic.
Today he’s working on mixed-use schemes for Ballymore/Merepark at Central Station, Liverpool, for Inacity at Piccadilly, Manchester and designed the West India Quay in London. All are single-site mixed-use schemes — sometimes called horizontal mixed use — in which various uses occupy different slices of a building.
Reinke says the big lesson of the past decade is that mixed use is all about “place-making”: “The design problem is one of place making — if you don’t get the place-making right none of it will be right — it’ll be a windswept 1970s no-mans-land of the kind we’ve seen too often. The way to learn how to make a place is to look at the places where it happens by accident to see what makes a success,” he says.
This means making it lively, appealing and slightly funky, says Reinke, who believes that looking north is the best way to grasp what mixed development needs: “Manchester is the best laboratory in the country for mixed development and what we see there is a mix of design and accident, and you get a dynamic enlivened atmosphere as a result,” says Reinke.
One short-cut to “place-making” could be to make the building look as arresting as possible. Nick Jopling, managing director at CBRE Hamptons International, thinks top-class architecture makes all the difference.
“We’ve studied mixed-use schemes all over the UK and internationally, and the successful ones share some features — a central location is vital, and being close to a transport hub helps, but an inconic structure really enhances the site beyond its inherent value.
“The architecture matters perhaps because it’s part of branding the scheme, and perhaps because city-centre mixed-use schemes are all on relatively small-scale sites. This means the design has to create value through mass, which means tall buildings and hence, at their best, iconic buildings,” Jopling claims.
What the customer wants
The second lesson is to make the scheme clever — meaning to consider what the building’s different users will want.
Reinke explains: “The most common error in mixed-use schemes is not understanding the customer. It stands to reason that if the customer is going to do big box retail they expect one kind of experience, a corporate office occupier expects another, and a guest in an urban hotel and resident in a city-centre apartment have different expectations again.
“We have to write a script for the customer, and the script has to make sense for each of the uses we mix. The script for each use must fit together, and not just be a bunch of one-man shows, or a noise, but a coherent conversation and ideally something beautiful,” he says.
Reinke claims that getting the mix right means an enhanced commercial result — and something aesthetically and socially pleasing.
“Just striving for yield is just not a successful commercial argument. You get the best commercial return from interrogating the mix of uses and creating a place. The big lesson on mixed use is that it’s not just about saying we want X yield out of Y sq ft, or stuffing as much on the site as you can,” he argues.
Developers have learned to be clever about how to mix their uses. Gregory Properties’ scheme in Halifax is among the most mixed of mixed-use schemes.
Mixing uses across different levels
The project is unusual as it mixes uses horizontally and vertically, with retail, leisure and residential linked across several levels rather than operating at separate ends of the development, which is the norm for most mixed-use schemes. The 50:50 split of retail and leisure use is also unusual — normally developers favour one or the other.
Richard Tovey, development director at Gregory, says: “The problem was how to fit a 429-space car park, a 9-screen cinema, 100,000 sq ft of retailing and 100 apartments, onto a small site. The scheme is designed to minimise the impact of the leisure space on the housing.”
Design discussions are in progress with both CABE and English Heritage — but according to Tovey it takes clever thinking to unlock tightly confined urban sites like this.
“The key is understanding the different requirements of different users, and then making that work in the design,” he says.
But the hardest lesson learned is that getting on with planners and the public sector is key to making mixed development work. Developers say it’s important to understand what they want, especially if the scheme covers hundreds of acres instead of a small city-centre plot.
Graeme Newman, director at Sovereign Land, says his long experience in the vast Cardiff Bay area where he’s been responsible for a 150,000 sq ft mixed leisure and retail scheme at Mermaid Quay, suggests you need clear planning guidance — and a public sector prepared to intervene to keep the project co-ordinated.
“Large mixed-use schemes need infrastructure and marketing, and neither can be done successfully without public sector help. What you also need is co-ordination between sites — and in Cardiff that could have been done better. We ended up completing Mermaid Quay three years too early and the area has only recently caught up with us thanks to the new Opera House and the Senedd building,” he says.
Eric Hall, planning director at Castlemore, which is managing mixed-use projects with a £2bn end value, adds: “Mixed-use schemes are more complicated, more expensive and more difficult to deliver. There is more time spent in planning and design and there are more issues to consider.”
Good looking, clever and well-informed: the key to success for mixed-use developments is, it seems, the same as for so much else in life.
